I read a really interesting paper today, Harold et al. 2016 ‘Cognitive and psychological science insights to improve climate change data visualization’. Not just useful for thinking about climate change data, but for planning effective figures of any sort.

Some points felt really familiar: articulations of experience and intuition I’d never thought to verbalize, like why I really want to have a figure and the text talking about it side-by-side to understand them together… turns out that’s a real cognitive Thing with its own term!

Here’s their Figure 2, summarizing the major points.

Anyway check it out for useful insights about improving the figures you’re working on right now.

http://rdcu.be/IIv6